Please note this is an actual email I received. No photos or names are used to protect the weirdo.

Online Profile Background:

Age: 46
Location: Midwest
Kids: 3 ages 12-18
Photo: Creepy eyes looking up at you like a pedophile that steals children in his unmarked van

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First email:

Reaction:Awe, cute. Makes you blush and feel good. Delete as it isn’t going any farther than that

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Second email:

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Reaction:Wait…WHAT???!!! Double take. Seriously? Oh my…

Immediate block placed. I didn’t even bother responding, avoiding any further communication for fear of what could have happened next.

My older brother around the same age joked I should have given him my credit card to fly him out this week so I could meet the man who the “universe” brought us together.

DON’T BE THAT GUY!!
Same goes for women.
You come on too strong early in the game = you are scary and all we will do is RUN in the opposite direction

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On another note: Dont wink, send a smile, like a photo, or comment on a photo and expect a response.

It is the equivalent of whistling at me from your car as I’m walking down the street.

What am I supposed to do? Come running after your car, jump on the bumper and introduce myself? If you don’t have the balls backbone to start a conversation, you won’t survive a date with a strong confident woman as myself.

Anyone else have stories like this they’d like to share?
Would love to hear from you to know I’m not alone.

Dating in the new age. I get asked many a time “how do you meet people?” And the truth is, most people meet their spouse in high school, college, or at work. So when you get into your thirties you have learned to steer clear of “$#*% where you work” but where do find the guy now? You can join a group or organization to find someone with the same interest. Or you can ask your coupled friends to set you up, that is, if they have any single friends besides you.

In my twenties I would hear the question, “When are you going to get married?” And my humorous response was always, “well I keep waiting for the husband store to open but no such luck”. But now they have and it is called online dating. Those words used to make me cringe… online dating. When it first came out, it was perceived as a way for losers that couldn’t find a real date in person to find that “special someone”. But now it has become the norm for our society. You can go online, flip through some photos and actually pick out a mate, just like the store I always dreamed of! Especially on the free sites. I have found these free websites to be based more on looks than the background and the inside of who the person really is. A perfect example of this is, is an article written by a very funny woman ALLI REED. She wrote an article on “4 Things I Learned from the Worst online Dating Profile Ever”. She created the worst profile ever – the woman was racist, stuck up, living off “daddies money” and just down right awful – but she was pretty. Definitely make sure to read both pages (as there are lots of ads that you may not know there are two). I promise, you will be stunned by the results…

I’ve been using one of the major dating sites, OkCupid, on and off for about five years now. While it has its perks, being a woman on a dating site means immersing yourself in a disgusting cesspool of exposed nerves, unfiltered testosterone, and daily propositions to engage in sex acts so horrifying, I hadn’t even heard of them before, and I’m from the Internet.

I got the feeling that a lot of men on that site would message literally any woman who had a profile, but the optimist in me wanted to believe that there was a limit. Maybe there was a woman so awful, so toxic, so irredeemably unlikable that no one would message her, or if they did, at least they would realize they never, ever wanted to meet her. So I made the OkCupid profile of the Worst Woman on Earth, hoping to prove that there exists an online dating profile so loathsome that no man would message it.

I am currently on two dating sites, Match and eHarmony, and paid for a subscription thinking that others who are willing to pay would be looking for a serious relationship too. Because eHarmony doesn’t feel like it isn’t all about looks, I have been using it more often than Match. I don’t get emails asking me for sex and I have control of who I want to talk to. But don’t get me wrong, there are men that email me that I wouldn’t fathom of dating as there is no future. Like the 55 year old man who contacted me. He was 5’6 and looked like a mix between Santa Claus and Danny DeVito. Sorry sir – I think I’ll have to pass.

It is OK to be selective – which can sound egotistical but why should I waste my time with a man who I don’t initially find attractive, their profile shows no signs of a personality or it says they “might want kids”, when I want children no matter what. It is a hard world out there, trying to find someone to be your mate for life. For those that are coupled or married, be thankful for those that are in your life. Make sure to tell them how much you care and want them. Don’t forget why you are together and how you got there in the first place.

There are other things I have discovered about online dating. And that is – every man is different (I know, shocking). One date introduced me to TWO different sets of friends, both birthday parties, on our second date but when I stepped away to get us coffee, I came back to him viewing his eHarmony account checking out other chicks. We clicked instantly but I learned that he was all about my looks, treating me as arm candy and about getting in my pants. Plus he lied on his profile saying he was 33 when he was actually 37. Or there have been a few men that use older pictures on their profile, not just a year or two, but like 5-7 years. So bad that I don’t even recognize them when I walk into the restaurant. My favorite was the guy who stated he was a non smoker – who within three dates went from a cigar smoker, to a social smoker, to a full-fledged smoker that wanted to quit. Why bother lying on paper (or the internet) when the truth will show its true colors eventually.

Another thing that has been revealed to me is the common behavior of dating multiple people at the same time. I remember as a teenager, my mom always told me that I should do the same but I never did. I always had this vision of having to write-up index cards with facts of each guy to keep things straight. Instead of using my mother’s wise words of advice, I would just find myself falling into relationships. I would get to know the guy for a few months, became friends, then was all of a sudden we were in a relationship. Not that it was bad or good, that is just how it developed for me – I’ve never done this whole dating thing before until now. Maybe it is easier for men to date multiple women. Just out of curiosity I did a little research and it seems that woman of all ages (even 55+) would prefer to only date one man at a time. The question is, at what point do you decide to hang your hat in one woman’s/man’s home? This new experience of online dating has opened my eyes to reality, awareness, and more red flags that I can comprehend – the red flags have changed too, especially as I have gotten older and so have my dates ages.

One last thing that I have unearthed is that it is OK to take things slow. That it will take more than a few dates before you should get into a relationship. I mean, how do you really get to know a person after meeting them a few times? I am not going to rush and try to jump into a relationship but I am not going to exhaust my time with men that I don’t see a future with. So what does that mean for me? It means that I am ready for love. I am a catch with my own quirks but deep down I am sure there is someone out there to see past the crap, take the “man’s role” by grabbing hold and not let me drive the relationship, treat me like the lady that I am but respect the individual that I have always been. I’d rather stay single than settle for the wrong guy. As long as I stay true to myself – I am sure I can find “the one”. My equal, my love, and the one man who is willing to work as hard as I am for a strong marriage.

What do you think of when you think of when you think of a single woman? Probably one of the two stereotypes, cut to a scene of: Example A – the woman at home with her cats, usually in her pajamas eating ice cream on a Saturday night or Example B – the all night party girl, at a loud dance club decked out in skanky clothes trying to find the man of the evening to go home with

Maybe it is the fact that my 30th birthday is this year or maybe it is a loss of another friend but I felt the need to speak up. I miss having lots of friends, especially male friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the women in my life but there is something about hanging out with the boys that is so comfortable for me. Maybe it’s because as a child most of my playmates were boys. Maybe it’s being raised by a mother that didn’t believe in defined gender roles, never saying what we could or couldn’t do because we were a boy or a girl. My first doll was a He-Man, long before I played with Barbie. And when I finally did play with Barbie it was my mother’s 50’s style Barbie, not the big boob blond that we know today. I love that the lines were never drawn out with a big fat permanent marker, but were perfectly blurred like water colors allowing us to move about to either side.

I was talking to my mother after I was told by another male friend that we couldn’t hang out because of his new girlfriend. I can’t begin to tell you how many male friends that I have lost to this issue. My mother pointed out that maybe if I was in a relationship, it would be different, but since I am a single girl I could be perceived as threatening. So with that, I would like to put the following out there.

• I don’t believe in cheating, I never have and never will

• I won’t make you a cheater, I don’t like drama in my life

• If I develop feelings for you, I will walk away as crossing that line isn’t appropriate

• If you develop feelings for me while in a relationship, you give me no choice but to shut the door on our friendship

• The last two won’t ever happen because the friendship is defined from the beginning through open communication. To all the girlfriends out there, if I wanted him or he wanted me, then you wouldn’t be in the picture in the first place. We probably experienced enough of each others idiosyncrasies that we knew that we couldn’t make it on a full time basis – by all means ladies, he is all yours!

Maybe one day we could all feel secure and trust each other enough to allow our partners to be friends with the opposite sex or comfortable to be friends with the opposite sex and not thinking there is an alternative motive hiding underneath the surface. I am different, I know my place and I wish that my friends had enough balls to stand their ground [pun intended] and say I am their friend. But that hasn’t been the case; the new girl always wins which saddens me to find out our friendship wasn’t a strong as I thought it was.

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On a similar note of friendship, for years I have used the quote “You laugh at me because I am different, I laugh at you because you’re all the same” but as much as I enjoy my independence, it still leaves me with the feeling of wanting to fit in. The last few weeks while looking for blog design ideas I also have been searching for bloggers to follow that I can identify with. There are the “I am a single woman, hear me roar” blogs that I found enjoyable, but then it started to drift towards the extreme level of “I am single and there is nothing wrong with me staying that way my entire life”. So I went off into the internet world to find others but all I could find were 20-something year olds [verbatim from their about me section] with the following three elements: recently married or soon to be, who loved fashion and/or beauty products and has the token tiny dog or new born baby. Don’t get me wrong, I like those things too but I am basically the complete opposite from these beautiful ladies. In fact, 14 years ago I thought I would have had their life but instead I have been guided down a different path filled with many life changing lessons.

Since I started blogging the one thing that I noticed from the beginning is I don’t have one defined genre, I am just kind of in the middle. I am not a fitness guru, a fashion critic, or a dating or sex goddess. I am just me. The way I am usually defined by others is caring. I care deeply about those in my life, so much so that I am willing to stop what I am doing at the drop of a hat to help them out or make them happy. I consider it both a blessing and a curse but it is me. Maybe someday I can find a blogging community that does the same?

I won’t blog about my marriage, as I don’t have one. I won’t blog about fashion as my closet consists of mostly cotton clothes. I won’t blog about cooking because it is never exciting cooking for one. I won’t blog about the cute thing that my pet did because my two cats are just that – cats, nowhere near a substitute for a child. And I won’t blog about being single, as it doesn’t define me. Blogging is a form of therapy for me, a way of reaching out to the world asking for a little acceptance, not because I conformed to the model that society has made but because I stand out amongst the herd. Once day I might become one of you: one of the married, the fitness freak, mother with mishaps, the cooking guru, or even a crafty Cathy. I am a woman in the middle. One day I might become one of you but until I can be called a wife or a mother, don’t define me as another single woman. Instead – I hope that you can call me a friend.